


they say you were something in those formative years

by theheartischill



Category: My So-Called Life
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-18
Updated: 2019-12-18
Packaged: 2021-02-26 01:34:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21841495
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theheartischill/pseuds/theheartischill
Summary: You become a different person, and then another different person, and you wonder sometimes what happens to all the old yous, if there’s some kind of room somewhere they sit around in like the dolls even your sister doesn’t play with anymore, and other times you wonder if you’ve ever changed at all. You grow up.And then, one day, it’s just, like… over.(Angela Chase, the last week of high school; the nature of sentimentality; old friends; a party.)
Comments: 35
Kudos: 54
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	they say you were something in those formative years

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blackbird](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackbird/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide, blackbird! It was lovely to have a chance to poke around at characters I've loved for so long - hope you enjoy!

You walk in a child. You meet people you never knew and talk to people you were afraid to talk to. You get a C in geometry and a B-plus in English and you don’t know which of those you should be prouder of or more embarrassed by. You dye your hair. You fall in love. You get your first broken heart, the one that feels like it’ll never heal, like that’s just who you are now. You drink your first beer, and sleep off your first hangover. You fall in love again. You have sex and it’s kind of disappointing and you spend a week wondering every time your mother talks to you if she can see it on you. You feel like she should be able to see it on you. You do it again and this time it’s kind of nice. You break your own heart. You become a different person, and then another different person, and you wonder sometimes what happens to all the old yous, if there’s some kind of room somewhere they sit around in like the dolls even your sister doesn’t play with anymore, and other times you wonder if you’ve ever changed at all. You grow up.

And then, one day, it’s just, like…  _ over_.

* * *

The last week of high school felt like walking through a haunted house where the ghosts were all lasts: This is my last Monday English class, Angela thought. This is my last Tuesday World History. This is the last time Jason Spellman will fart in the ceramics room, and the last time Nicole Evans complains about the cafeteria. This is our last PA announcement no one can understand and congealed cafeteria pizza and dodgeball game. This is the last time I go to the bathroom and every single dispenser is out of soap.

In the halls that eerie week where nothing felt real, a few times she thought she saw Jordan, leaning in his flannel against a locker with his hair in his eyes, waiting to kiss her or ruin her life or ask if he could copy her homework for Anderson’s class. She felt like she should be able to see him, like the real dark magic of those days was that everything she had ever been was existing at once so she could say good-bye. But he had dropped out sometime last year. That was what their last big fight had been about. Sometimes they ran into each other around town and they never pretended they didn’t see each other but they never said hi, either. It made her feel crazy that it was possible for someone who had known her like he’d known her, someone she’d unraveled for and cried over and shared her body with in every way she knew how, to look at her like a stranger. It made her feel crazier that she did the same thing to him. But maybe that was life: learning to carry all your ghosts.

* * *

“I don’t have to invite her,” Sharon said. “Really.”

“For the millionth time,” said Angela, “it’s fine. It’s your graduation party, and she’s your friend, and just like every other time, it’ll be fine. We’re…” She paused, searching for the precise word. “Cordial. We’re cordial. You know, like coworkers. Not that I’ve ever had a coworker.”

“Okay.” Sharon pursed her lips. “I have to say, I’m not going to miss this joint custody situation.”

“Is there anything you  _ are _ going to miss?” Angela said.

Sharon looked at her like she was nuts. “I mean, yeah. Aren’t you?”

“Like what?” Angela said, incredulous. “What is there to miss? About  _ high school_.”

“Like,” Sharon said, “yearbook, and all my friends, and band, and just knowing where everything is and what I’m supposed to do, and, I don’t know. Not everything, because so many things suck, but the things that don’t suck. You really don’t think you’re going to miss anything?”

Angela shrugged. “Not really. I guess I’m not much of a joiner.”

Sharon narrowed her eyes. “You’re so full of shit,” she said, not unfondly. “You’re like the most sentimental person I’ve ever met. You’re going to be up at Bennington, and the  _ light _ through a classroom window is going to remind you of junior year physics lab, or you’re going to eat cereal in the dining hall and think about how even though it’s the same mass-marketed product, it just doesn’t taste the  _ same _ without Danielle practicing cartwheels in the living room.”

“I’m not  _ sentimental_,” Angela protested. She didn’t want to be sentimental, at least. She wanted to be smart, and interesting, and to feel the right amount of feelings. Sentimental was something kids were, and that part of her life was coming to an end.

“Oh, please.” Sharon rolled her eyes. Then her face became serious. “Wait, but speaking of sentiment, I do need one favor from you for this party.”

“Sure, what is it?” She expected Sharon to say something like buying plastic cups or bringing her dad’s big glass bowl for dip.

“You  _ cannot _ let me fuck Kyle,” Sharon said. “I’m inviting him because I’m inviting a bunch of his friends and it would be weird not to, and I’m going to be drunk and nostalgic and I know I’m going to think of it, but when the moment comes you  _ must _ talk me out of it. I have to start my adult life with, like, integrity to the person I’ve become.”

“That’s kinda beautiful,” Angela said.

“Thanks!” said Sharon. “But seriously. This is your solemn duty.”

“Aye aye, Captain,” Angela intoned with mock solemnity, and the two of them doubled over laughing in Sharon’s room like any one of hundreds of times before, and maybe not many more after.

* * *

You count down the days and the days run out. You sit in the gym on one of those plastic folding chairs that spend most of their life in hibernation, like cicadas, sweating under dark polyester and a cap that scratches at your scalp. Someone too busy studying to hang out with anyone gives a speech about how this moment is about both the past and the future and you think, isn’t that true of all moments? Like, technically. Teachers lie about how proud they are. You walk across the stage to shake hands with the assistant principal who still sometimes calls you  _ Agatha_. Your mom cries and your sister rolls her eyes and you think that when it’s her turn, she’ll be better at this than you are. She’ll hug her friends and cry and laugh and throw her cap into the air without being ironic about it and listen to your mom congratulate her without acting like she’s dying to get away. You stand around watching everyone act like they’re not all going to forget this as fast as they can. Maybe some of them aren’t. Maybe that’s just you.

So anyway, graduation was fine. It was whatever. It was like high school: it happened and then it was over. 

* * *

“Do you think I’m sentimental?” Angela asked. “Be honest.”

“Duh,” said Ricky. “It’s like your best quality.” He tilted his head. “I liked the other top, but can I see it with these jeans?”

Angela obediently began to change. “Really? I mean, we just graduated, and I felt, like, nothing. I felt like a hole where a feeling should be.”

“I don’t think that’s what being sentimental is,” Ricky said. “I mean, I’m  _ totally _ sentimental, and half the time all I feel is wanting someone else to shut the fuck up.”

Angela laughed, buttoning up her shirt. “So what is it, then?”

“I think it’s about trying to see the, like, beauty in everything,” said Ricky. “Like when it was your break-up anniversary, and you said that thing about how maybe the reason love hurts is to help us move on when it’s over.”

“I can’t believe you remember that,” she said.

“Of course I remember that,” Ricky said. “I thought it was really like, profound.”

“Thanks,” Angela said, moved. “Oh, did you still want to borrow my bracelet?”

* * *

It turned out high school was kind of like virginity: she thought she’d be more different afterwards than she was. She tried to tell herself as she moved through her days: I’m eating this lasagna as an adult. It’s not a kid anymore who’s riding her bike into town. This is the first load of laundry of my grown-up existence. She looked for some secret shine or previously unknown color that she had suddenly developed the ability to see. When that failed, she looked inside herself for a new wellspring of certainty. What Sharon said, about living with integrity to the person she had become—Angela wanted to commit to that, but the truth was after four years of obsessing over that question, she’d come no closer to an answer.

* * *

At Sharon’s party, with Sharon’s parents out of town, Angela stepped outside. She was having fun, drinking cheap beer and watching the boys play beer pong and teasing Brian Krakow about all the girls he was going to meet at Cornell. It had been nice, when Sharon started having parties where bolstered by their friendship Angela felt like she could practice having an actual life. But sometimes she just needed a moment to watch her life happening from the outside, a habit like waking up from a nightmare and digging out the one stuffed animal she’d never gotten rid of. She wondered if she’d ever outgrow it. If she’d ever be able to just live her life, without needing to pause every so often to narrate.

“Oh, shit—sorry, didn’t see you there.”

Angela looked up: Rayanne, unlit cigarette between her fingers, beads around her neck tangling with her wild unruly hair, flask at her hip. She tensed for one moment (old habits, muscle memory or memory for something deeper than muscle, in the bits of her that held everything close) before she remembered: cordial. Like coworkers. It had been years now since there was any bite between them. “Oh, hey. No worries.” She tried to think of what a coworker would do. “Enjoying the party?”

“I  _ am _ the party,” Rayanne said.

She offered Angela her flask and after a second Angela took it. Like a peace offering, kind of. This was adulthood, she thought, trying not to wince at the taste. All that had happened between them was on the other side of the line they’d finally crossed.

“I heard you’re off up north,” Rayanne said. “Gonna study old books and shit?”

“Yeah,” Angela said. “Maybe. I mean, probably. I mean, I’m not gonna major in math.” She hadn’t thought much about her major, or about classes, or about her dorm. She would have all summer now to start wondering. “What are you going to do next?”

“My piercing place is gonna let me answer the phones,” Rayanne said. “Not exactly the  _ intellectual life_.” She waggled her eyebrows in a way that somehow made it seem like she was making fun of the two of them equally.

“Are you gonna miss it?” Angela said. “School, I mean.” She cringed a little at herself, feeling stupid after she’d said the word. “Sorry. Dumb question.”

“It is a dumb question,” Rayanne said. But her voice was unexpectedly serious when she said, “No.”

“Yeah,” Angela said. “I figured.”

“There’s only one thing I’d miss,” Rayanne said. “This girl I used to know. Redhead, kinda cute. And I already miss her. So.”

Angela thought, Rayanne is drunk. And she thought, adulthood is about knowing what to leave behind. And she thought, how am I supposed to know who the person is that I’ve become?

“Rayanne,” she started.

“Sorry, I was just—feeling sentimental.” Rayanne smiled, her old crooked smile, like her old waggling eyebrows, like everything familiar and magnetic about her that Angela had spent two years pretending she didn’t miss.

You walk in a child, you walk out something else. You fall in love, you break your heart. You roll your eyes and twirl your hair and do your homework and fail a quiz and scream at your mother and cry in her bed and try to tear apart everything you know to discover what you think is true and somewhere in there, somewhere between the tears and the laughter and the boys and the late nights and the secrets and the held hands and the waiting, you grow up. Or that’s what you think. That’s what you hope. But maybe it doesn’t happen in a moment, and it maybe it doesn’t happen only once. Maybe you grow up every time you remember: you have to decide who you want to be.

You get to decide who you want to be.

“It’s the piercing place on State Street?” Angela said.

“Yep,” Rayanne said, and took a swig.

“I was thinking,” Angela said, “of getting another hole. Just, like, in the lobe. Before college. Maybe I’ll stop by, sometime.”

Rayanne watched her curiously. “Yeah, okay.”

“And maybe—” Angela took a deep breath. “Maybe we could get lunch, after. There’s that pizza place on the corner. Or, like, wherever.” She bit her lip.

Angela had missed this, too: how when Rayanne smiled her whole face lit up, like a little kid, like the sun or the chemical reaction in the lightbulb when they made potato batteries in eighth grade science. The way it had felt to be the person who made her look like that.

“Yeah, sure,” Rayanne said.

“I’m around all summer, actually,” Angela said, feeling a little braver now, “we could even go to that place we went, remember when we went around trying to get bus fare? Telling people we were—”

“Twins,” Rayanne said, laughing a little, disbelievingly. “Yeah, yeah—for old times’ sake, or whatever.”

“Well,” Angela said, “you know me. I’m sentimental.” And she grinned, because maybe it was true, but maybe it was okay, too. Maybe it didn’t mean that she felt too much. Maybe it was just a way of saying that she knew—she had always known—that things, like, mattered.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Tori Amos, "Pretty Good Year," because 1994.


End file.
